As per the top ITSM trends review, most businesses had a wake-up call in the years 2020 and 2021. It’s a universal truth that the pandemic has left a permanent mark on every business. IT is no different. In our top ITSM Trends analysis review project, we found that organizations are demonstrating a heightened sense of urgency to meet the challenges of the modern IT environment. Efficient and scalable IT service management (ITSM) processes are a top priority for nearly all organizations: according to a recent report on top ITSM trends and updates, the global Cloud ITSM market is expected to grow from $4.7 billion in 2020 to more than $12 billion by 2025, at a CAGR of 21.2 percent.

The IT service management industry, like many others, will face significant changes in 2020, owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, in particular. Many of the changes wrought by this unprecedented situation have spawned new trends that will have an impact on ITSM solutions in the future.

In this article, we’ll look at the top ITSM trends for 2021, as well as how businesses are leveraging ITSM to accelerate value delivery and improve core offerings.

• The Digital Transformation
• People Come First.
• ITSM Solutions With AI For Smart Automation
• Adaptability
• 4th ITIL Certification
• Management of Enterprise Services
• Hyperautomation for IT Tools and Environments That Are Integrated
• Better communication between employees working from home
• Greater responsiveness to employee needs
• Higher levels of automation 
• More ITSM solutions will be AI-based
• Increased importance of adaptability
• Transition to the new ITIL 4 framework
• Redesigned risk management
• Redefined organization objectives
• Enhanced data security
• Transition toward integrated IT environments

Here’s a systematic overview of each of these categories as per our top ITSM trends analysis.

Digital Transformation 

One of the obvious trends that were observed in 2020 and 2021 is the complete digital transformation of businesses. Organizations would continue to push for digital adoption in 2022.

Digital transformation is a key activity for any business. In recent years, Digital Adoption Services (DAS) have emerged as a new category in enterprise software DevOps and analytics stacks. DAS provides the agility that every business is looking out for in their tech investments. The big players in various sectors can no longer conduct business as usual because they risk losing relevance and being displaced by younger, more agile companies eager to adapt. For example, consider the logistics sector: disruptive technologies such as autonomous robots are rapidly taking over the last-mile delivery sector, while major players are struggling to adapt.

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ITSM tools and processes, as well as their successful integration with other systems, are critical in establishing a stable foundation for digital-first businesses. Working from home has made digital transformation not only desirable (and something that will be implemented gradually over the next few years), but also absolutely necessary for a company’s survival. IT departments are working hard to make this possible.

Putting People First: ITSM for Better Collaboration

Another key theme for tech companies this year (as it was last year) is the realization that, as BMC puts it, people are more important than anything else. There are two major iterations of the “people first” principle:

• Customer satisfaction can (and will) make or break your business.
• Employee relationships and experience are equally important.

Investing in the satisfaction of your employees and customers is thus one of the best growth strategies, and it cannot be replaced by simply having a stellar product or a super competitive service offering. Human relationships are just as important as they were before the age of automation, if not more so. Working from home, on the other hand, has put a strain on those relationships. Communication is more difficult than ever, and employees are easily frustrated when things aren’t going well.

Recommended: 5 Predictions for Changes in Customer Engagement in 2022

How are you going to solve this? 

ITSM tools can help with this by improving communication among team members (especially when they work from home), as well as keeping response time to a minimum and resolving customer issues as soon as possible. As the pandemic has demonstrated, change can be sudden and dramatic, and being able to rely on others can help you move forward. 

How can software integrations help you better support your teams?

During the pandemic, most businesses were required to implement WFH procedures. Chiefly, an increasing number of businesses now hire remote workers, and larger teams are frequently dispersed across the globe. As a result, streamlining and simplifying collaboration between teams and departments is critical, and integrating your ITSM tools with the rest of your applications is beneficial.

AI-Enabled ITSM Solutions for Smart Automation

Businesses would march ahead in 2022 wielding AI and machine learning applications in their tech stacks. This year would be a crucial year for all IT customers who have an opportunity to scale the gap between leaders and laggards. We can expect to see wider adoption of AI technology across ITSM, especially for business intelligence, security management, storage, and remote collaboration.

This year, we will emphasize largely on innovations in fields related to:

• Cognitive Intelligence
• Natural Language Processing (NLP)
• Business Process Optimization
• Segmentation and clustering
• knowledge management
• Automated problem incident response
• AutoML and Supercomputing/ GPUs

The business world has yet to fully embrace artificial intelligence, despite the fact that AI has the potential to simplify and automate a significant portion of service desk tasks: think chatbots, automatic incident resolution, and ML-enabled security threat detection.

The capabilities of AI-enabled tools are closely related to smart automation. Human intervention in ITSM can be reduced along a few different axes:

• Automation of routine, repetitive tasks
• Alerts and incidents in real-time
• Machine learning algorithms are used to analyze large data sets.
• To reduce noise, smart notification and alert management are used.
• End-to-end data transfer that is automated

As you can see, smart automation in IT service management is based on a variety of technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), data analytics, machine learning, workflow automation, and software integrations.

How can software integrations assist you in smartly automating your processes?

Software integrations assist you in automating your workflows and enabling real-time data transfer in your organization. They eliminate the possibility of human error and enable each team to benefit from all of the software tools you’re using.

This enables businesses to improve the detection and resolution of incidents and defects in complex IT infrastructure, allowing them to act before problems affect their end customers. As a result, they can boost productivity, shorten response times, and save money by avoiding costly downtime.

Adaptability

In 2022, project management teams would have a hard time selecting an Agile ITSM system.

In order to ensure business continuity in 2020 and 2021, IT departments must adapt to multifaceted demands. They must strike a balance and prioritize competing demands:

• Remote work’s technological challenges
• Employee requirements and requests
• Security threats, particularly with the increased use of various devices and applications 
• Management requirements

CIOs and IT managers must be able to respond quickly to changing circumstances while also retiring outdated ITSM tools and solutions and replacing them with more agile ones.

How can software integrations assist you in becoming more adaptable?

You can improve the functionality of your ITSM tool of choice by connecting it to other tools using the right software integration platform, making adaptability a priority.

When ITSM, DevOps, and monitoring are in sync, you can respond to new challenges with speed and agility. Furthermore, if you need to switch from one ITSM tool to another, or if you need to use two tools concurrently (for different aspects of IT infrastructure management), an integration platform can help you connect the two in a few seconds.

Migrating to ITIL 4

Switching from ITIL 3 to ITIL 4 was one of the hot topics of 2020, but the pandemic has displaced ITIL 4 as a top trend in favor of digital transformation, according to ITSM Tools. Nonetheless, for businesses that rely on the ITIL framework, the transition is still ongoing, and more and more businesses will adopt ITIL 4 by 2021.

ITIL 4 specifies 34 key management practices that enable businesses to align ITSM with DevOps, Agile, Lean, and Cloud technologies. This is accomplished by taking a value-driven and customer-centric approach to IT service management rather than a product-oriented one.

How can software integrations assist you in making the transition to ITIL4?

By integrating all of your tools and workflows, you will be much better prepared to implement ITIL 4’s holistic approach to the four main dimensions of business processes:

• Organizations and individuals
• Technology and information
• Suppliers and partners
• Processes and value streams

ITIL 4 extends beyond IT service management and teaches you how to apply service management practices to everything, allowing you to transition to enterprise service management (which is also the next point). With a powerful software integration platform, you can quickly redesign and modify your processes to support these changes.

Management of Enterprise Services

Did you know data operations (DataOps) saw a significant rise in the number of new concepts during the COVID? One such concept is the “Internet of Behavior” or IOB. 

IT Service management is hugely influenced by the arrival of IoB capabilities in DataOps. Data-driven IoB has allowed ITSM companies to become more location-independent, people-centric, and resilient.

Enterprise Service Management (ESM) extends service management principles beyond IT to the entire organization. It provides businesses with complete visibility into their service processes via various databases, systems, and software tools, allowing them to track all business resources, customer requests, and service commitments.

External resources can also be more easily coordinated when you have a bird’s-eye view of your processes via ESM. Essentially, ESM entails taking the best practices of ITSM and applying them to your entire organization.

How can software integrations aid in the implementation of ESM?

ESM is implemented by integrating all systems in order to connect teams and departments and enable end-to-end data exchange. You can easily integrate your systems by syncing your tools with a software integration platform.

IT Tools and Environments in Hyperautomation Environment

Another hot topic for 2021 is software integration: businesses must integrate their systems and environments quickly and efficiently in order to remain competitive and enable their teams to work in sync.

ITSM does not exist in isolation. In most cases, it’s tightly linked to a number of other critical business processes and approaches, such as DevOps, which emphasizes agility and shorter delivery cycles, but also IT operations management (ITOM), APM, and others. As a result, integrating ITSM tools with other software applications is more important than ever.

Better Communication Between Employees Working From Home

Companies and work teams will strike a balance between working from home and meeting in a central location (which may or may not be a traditional “office”).

Many organizations and managers are beginning to recognize the importance of face-to-face interactions (whether professional or social) and will need to devise novel methods of bringing teams together.

Greater Responsiveness to Employee Needs

If there is one takeaway from the COVID-19 pandemic, it is that circumstances, like end-user needs, can change quickly and dramatically. Understanding employee needs will become increasingly important for ITSM departments in the hybrid (work from home + office) work environment.

The end-user experience should be evaluated on a regular basis in order to quickly change and adapt strategies and services as needed.

Higher Levels of Automation 

ITSM automation and integration levels will skyrocket in 2021, thanks in large part to the implementation of software solutions that promote this.

Nonetheless, IT service management departments must ensure that they have the technical skills to manage this new complexity in order to avoid failures that they are unable to resolve, resulting in a loss of employee confidence.

More ITSM Solutions Will Be AI-Based

AI will play a significant role in the future of ITSM and IT operations by increasing efficiency, ease of use, and introducing new features.

As a result, more businesses will rely on AI-powered solutions like chatbots, AI-assisted data analysis, and intelligent automation.

Increased Importance of Adaptability

By 2021, IT service management departments will need to be adaptable. They will have to adjust to an increasing volume of requests, consider replacing outdated ITSM solutions, and deal with new data protection regulations, to name a few challenges.

Managers must have excellent leadership and organizational skills to manage so many changes within a department.

Transition to the New ITIL 4 Framework

ITIL 4 makes the transition from cascading management to agile process management easier, and it places a greater emphasis on continuous value creation for end-users than its predecessor. As a result, an increasing number of organizations will adopt ITIL 4 by 2021.

In version 4, the framework’s new Service Value System (SVS) defined 34 management practices. By bringing IT service management, development, operations, business relationships, and governance functions closer together, enabling organizations to manage leaner IT services.

Redesigned Risk Management

Many organizations will rethink their risk management and business continuity practices as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. This could help them be better prepared the next time a threat to their operations arises.

However, these organizations must avoid over-protecting themselves against improbable risks, or they risk investing large sums of money for no reason.

Redefined Organization Objectives

Many organizations have had to reconsider their business objectives as a result of the global pandemic. Some have gone into survival mode, while others are bracing for a massive attack.

When a company’s goals shift, they must be reflected at the operational level. As a result, some IT support departments will most likely be eliminated, while others’ tasks will be changed.

Enhanced Data Security

Cyberattacks no longer affect only large corporations, but also SMEs. This is causing businesses to be more concerned than ever before about the security of their confidential data stored in their IT systems.

It is unsurprising that increased information security will be a key trend in information and communication technology management in 2021. This is especially true in situations where data must be accessible to employees remotely.

Transition Toward Integrated IT Environments

Companies had no choice but to use various providers for their IT needs a few years ago: a help desk solution, cloud storage provider, telephony system, email providers, and so on. This raises costs and lowers productivity.

As businesses seek the stability and lower costs associated with versatile ITSM solutions, the transition to integrated environments and software with greater integration capabilities will accelerate in 2021.

What’s in Store for 2022?

ITSM trends would continue to evolve with the further maturity of AI and Hyperautomation applications. Every business operation would benefit from the adoption of the latest ITSM strategies and suffer the worst outcomes if top ITSM trends are neglected for too long. From tracking business outcomes to building agile service management platforms for field and remote customer service executives, a lot is slated to happen in ITSM that would render fully-centralized IT frameworks 100% obsolete in the coming months.

[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]